


and it ends like this

by Lilaciliraya



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Also Not Spencer, Angst, Bullying, But Not Spencer, Childhood, Dysfunctional Family, Eating Disorders, Emotional Hurt, Fucked Up, Gen, Growing Up, Hurt Spencer, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loneliness, Sad Spencer, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm, Worst Tags Ever omg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 08:38:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9483185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilaciliraya/pseuds/Lilaciliraya
Summary: When you are ten years old you see your mother bash her fists against her head so hard you gasp from the pain of it. You stand in the doorway while she draws her weapons back over and over and over, and with each hit your mind cries at you to move move move.An hour later finds you holed up in your closet with three books to your chest and a lasting look of terror on your face.You didn’t know that people could do that. It seems so silly, but you didn't know.You wonder if it feels more or less, to hurt yourself.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I did this instead of working on the next chapter of desire, but it happened. I might continue this by adding an actual plot somewhere in the 30 years I just ignored. Who knows. I don't pretend to have any control over my writing.
> 
> Inspired by this quote: "Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."  
> ― Kait Rokowski

It ends like this.

  


You see the red red red flowing out of you and something inside you changes, just a little past too late. You see the blood pouring from your thigh and you think it’s nothing new. This pent up hurt pooling on the tile is old and stale and long past dead. You see the blood and you see your whole life, you see the trail of red behind you that you’ve been leaving for years and years and years. You remember, at that moment, something you read far too long ago; it went like this: nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

  


You’ve been churning out poetry since the day you started breathing in the smoke off of everyone else’s breath. Without you there will be no one left to write it.

  


And then you’re going, going-

  


gone.

  


……….

  


You were always different. And nobody could really tell, at first, if different was okay or not. Your father never understood you. He wanted a normal family with a normal son and you wished you could be that for him, you always wished so so hard. But no matter how much it hurt nothing would change. You would always enjoy reading with your mother more than trying to play football with your father. 

  


When you are five, you join his little league team anyways, because you are young and maybe because you think pretending matters, but mostly because you want your father to love you.  It doesn’t work; you can’t last five minutes running around the field without getting distracted by- oh look, Dad, look!

  


That’s a Black Swallowtail butterfly! Did he know that there’s this thing called a scientific name for sorting all of the animals in the whole world? And they have one of those, too! It’s called papillio poly- polyxe- polyxenes! And they can taste with their feet, you read that. You also heard that Monarch butterflies migrate like birds, which means they fly really really far every year to get away from the winter. Does he think you could do that? And- oh!- did he know that airplanes can fly people around at 600 miles per hour? That’s super fast and you think being a pilot is pretty cool, because planes need people to fly them, and they get to travel around all the time, but you also like reading a lot like Mom, so maybe you’d rather just be a passenger. Where do you even build planes? And how can you test them so you know they fly right? Maybe you could build the planes, is there a job for just doing that? Maybe you want to do that instead. You’ll have to keep learning first. 

  


You can’t stop the words from spilling out of your mouth, and you never understand why people aren’t as interested in this stuff as you are, and you never understand why you’d ever want to hold it all in.

  


Your father tries to listen and he never cuts you off, but he doesn’t really understand. And then practice is over, and your father sighs, and he gives you a look that stalls all the bouncy balls in your head. When he turns his back on you to talk to the rest of the team, the normal ones, the boys who like to do the things little boys are supposed to, like your father wants you to, you hurt a little more.

  


You learn how your mind can always hurt.

  


Being different seems awfully synonymous with being sad.

  


Years later, when your father is long gone, your home becomes somewhere you’re normal, and it doesn’t really help at all. Your mother’s always loved your mind, and she reads to you when she can and listens when she can and encourages you to learn, learn, learn. But when she doesn’t she’s laying in bed for days forgetting you exist, or warning you about the neighbor’s secret plans to experiment on you, or screaming and hitting and hurting. And being the normal one doesn’t seem so great now either.

  


Maybe no matter what side you’re on, different hurts, hot like burning skin.

  


……….

  
  


You are a nine year old prodigy in a Las Vegas public high school. You learn very quickly what it means to hurt. Hurt is bad, bad, bad, so loud it drowns out all other thoughts in your head. 

  


Hurt is four boys far older than you getting a less than satisfactory grade on a math test. Hurt is the cold of a metal locker against your back and the knowledge that they’ve found you again, the wait for what is to come.

  


Hurt is your parents being driven apart by something so loud loud that the bruises are pressed into silence. Hurt is the wide look in your teachers’ eyes and the way they flinch away as if burned. As if by ignoring the evidence they could become better academics, could prove that a nine year old kid hasn’t beaten them quite yet. 

  


Hurt is the way you know you’d give it all up for a chance to be one of them, one of the normal ones, one of the people who don’t hurt every day for existing.

  


Hurt is a secret that thrives in the darkness. Everyone’s eyes just skip right over it.

  


……….

  
  


When your mother gets sick- really sick, you mean- you feel a flash of hope so bright it burns in your stomach like acid. You never told anyone, but part of you was so glad it finally made sense. You thought that this monster taking your mother away was the reason you were so different, thought that it was like a storybook, like you were the hero and schizophrenia was your dragon to slay. You were sure that one day you would cure schizophrenia and have your mother back and all the hurt would be over because heroes always get a happy ending.

  


Back then you thought a lot of things, and your thoughts were soft and they never hurt.

  


……….

  


When you are ten years old you see your mother bash her fists against her head so hard you gasp from the pain of it. You stand in the doorway while she draws her weapons back over and over and over, and with each hit your mind cries at you to move move move. 

  


You don’t know how long you stand there just watching, but the shock of it is so much that by the time your father pushes past you to hold her wrists every muscle in your body aches with tension.

  


Your father doesn’t meet your eyes when he leads your mother from the room, and you step aside and keep stepping until you’re holed up in your closet with three books to your chest and a lasting look of terror on your face.

  


You didn’t know that people could do that. It seems so silly, but you didn’t know.

  


You wonder if it feels more or less, to hurt yourself.

  


For some reason you don’t think that’s a question you could ask one of your teachers, so you keep it to yourself and wonder why it feels like you’re breaking a rule by contemplating experimentation. 

  


You think, looking back, that that must be the reason you always feel like you have something to hide. The shame got into you so early you don’t remember, now, what it was like without the lock you acquired, the one with no key.

  


……….

  


Your father only ever hit you once, right before he left. You don’t even remember why, and it doesn’t matter because what you do remember taught you so much more than he ever could. It didn’t even hurt. That’s the first thing you think, after. When most of your days are spent curling away from the unrestrained blows of children that are still unaware of the damage they can inflict, a slap to the face doesn’t even register.

  


It doesn’t even hurt. But your insides are throbbing and the thoughts in your head are squirming like they could burst free. There’s no real physical injury. But somehow it hurts it hurts it hurts.

  


It isn’t until later that you understand.

  


Your mother always loved literature and you’ve always wanted to be like your mother. Once you’re alone you read it together and you study it on your own and you learn how pain can live inside you and never show. The worst pain is in the mind, and your mind has never been anything but above average. That’s why you think it hurts so much much all the time and it never ever stops.

  


For a long time you looked at pain and you saw something so big that its shadow alone could erase you under it’s weight.

  


Now makes you feel safer, a little bit, when you read about all this pain that people felt, these authors who lived hundreds of years ago. It makes you feel a little less alone. And when you memorize their words exactly as they said them, it makes you feel like they can live through you and help you deal with the world, help you be as strong as they were in the face of ragged hurt hurt hurt.

  


It makes you feel like pain can be a little lovely. You come to think of it like a friend.

  


Through pain, they are writing so much. They are writing through the tired eyes of all the people with heavy aching holes in their chests. They are writing of you.

  


And they write it so beautifully.

  


……….

  
  


Then your father is gone gone gone, and you have long since overcome the hesitance in your bones. When your mother has a fit your muscles contract reflexively, dragging your too heavy skeleton to the scene the way they failed to what feels like a lifetime ago.

  


You are 10 years old, and you are smart enough to know that you aren’t supposed to feel this way, like everything is pressing in, collapsing into you.

  


But you don’t think you’re supposed to talk about it. So you don’t.

  


Your mother needs you so often that each episode passes by in a blur, and it feels like you are simply losing time rather than caring for her. The days are all so similar they seem to disappear into a single memory.

  


There’s just one day that stands out. 

  


Your mother is sitting at the kitchen table, a rare sight at this point, and you remember being proud of something so little. You are sitting across from her, trying to figure out how to run a household on your own, how to make money, care for your mother, go to school, keep it all hidden. You also remember that when she starts tugging at her hair like it’s killing her you pause for a moment.

  


And in that bubble in between breaths you remember thinking a thought that changed you. And by the time your body caught up to reality your mother had a fistful of her own blonde hair pulled out and was going back for more.

  


You remember thinking:

  


It’s so much easier being the hurt one.

  


And it’s not as if it’s something so profound you had to sit and run it through your head for minutes just to draw out the meaning. It’s just, you aren’t exactly sure, it’s- it’s wrong but you believe it and you know you shouldn’t. Or- it’s not that exactly. It’s that in that  moment you truly wished you were beyond repair. 

  


You realized that maybe different doesn’t hurt everyone. Maybe she hurts because she’s different and you hurt because she’s hurting. And that’s why you hurt being different, and that’s why you still hurt at home, where you’re not.

  


And if that’s the case, then in a world so full of pain you can’t take a breath without choking on it, you think you’d rather be one of the hurt ones, so then you’ll only have to hurt for yourself.

  


And years later when people learn about your childhood they tell you that you were so, so strong. They push this image on you, like you made a noble sacrifice and faced the world without fear. Like you were some sort of hero.

  


So you stop telling people. Because you know it’s all a lie, you know you were- are- weak, weak, weak. But that’s a secret, because you promised your mother you weren’t. 

The whole time, though, you still know that you are all twisted up inside and wrong.

  


You weren’t strong. You were collecting the hurt like a shield, so nothing would ever be worse. A paper cut feels like nothing with a broken arm attached. And that was how you faced the world. With pain and pain and pain, even though you knew it wasn’t quite right.

  


So you do all you can to avoid the word strong.

  


Because you are so far from it the sounds of each letter in order made your thighs itch.

  


……….

  


When you are eleven years old you are a junior in high school. There’s a girl in your school, a freshman this year, and she’s older than you but she’s so, so small. For some reason you look at her and feel something picking at your lock, the one hiding those things that feel so inky black, all thick and sharp and heavy. So you watch her for a little while, and you learn.

  


She goes to lunch and she drinks water and drinks and drinks and, oh, you think, she’s like that, too. And you remember watching your mother and you remember the revelation of what people are capable of doing to themselves, of how thoroughly they can control their experiences. This girl is a little different; this time you’re intrigued by the subtlety of her method, and the sides of your stomach curl with curiosity. 

  


You remember- does it hurt more or does it hurt less, and maybe, you think this time, it hurts just the same. Because you know that hunger can hurt, you know that by now, and nobody else can make you feel it any different, and it has never struck you as anything particularly fascinating.

  


And then you don’t understand.

  


Not understanding why she would do it doesn’t stop you from watching her, though. You look at her and she’s so small, and she’s not scared at all. And you look at her and you’re almost proud, but that feels so fluttery and wrong inside of you.

  


Every day she sits and she drinks and she doesn’t eat a thing, and it’s so obvious that she shouldn’t be that small, and nobody does anything. No one ever says anything at all. 

  


And then they start teasing. They say she’s too skinny, too ugly, too not right, and that’s it, they definitely know, and they use it against her. They laugh. And that hurts, a hurt that tingles up your front and makes you shiver, makes the blood in your veins burn with the weight of it, with the weight of the shadow of her pain.

  


And the first day you sit on your bench watching and you don’t eat a bite. You stare at the sky like it holds an answer, and you stare and process what you’ve learned. Your instinct was right, it’s all one big secret, it has to be. 

  


Instead of breathing the hurt and molding it and leaving it behind, you have to shove it down and keep it in. Always. Maybe, you think, that’s the difference. Because you’re sure that there has to be one, you’ve stubbed a toe before, you’ve scraped your knees, and each time, though you hid it with a bandage, it was okay to say ouch, it was okay for you to go back out and play and fall again.

  


Maybe the difference is that holding the hurt inside makes it leak out, makes it burn all the way through, not just against the skin, the muscle, bone.

  


So you decide it is different, it has to be. And you look at her and she is so small and so silently loud and so heartbreakingly beautiful.

  


……….

  


The first time you acknowledge that you’ve stopped thinking about it as an experiment or an academic interest, you are twelve. You’re swinging at a park all alone and everyone around you seems so far away. And you think to yourself, that even if you were to push through the thick cloud of emptiness around you, you would be different than those other kids, somehow.

  


But you look down at where your legs are hanging and you look so plain, and your head is so fuzzy, and the world so far away, but you’re just all the same. And that can’t be how it is.

  


So you push off of the swing you’d been sitting on and move your average legs as fast as you can until your plain, normal house comes into view, and you push open your door that looks just like it should, and you run to the bathroom and strip yourself naked.

  


And you stare into your bathroom mirror, and stare and stare and. Your vision goes blurry, eventually. And you still haven’t found anything. There’s no mark on your body that sets you apart, that explains why your experience has to be so fundamentally different than everyone else’s.

  


You know there should be.

  


There should be a blinking neon sign around your neck that marks you as other, other, other.

  


That’s the first time you truly feel like making one.

  


……….

  


One day you take your fists and raise them up and pound them back down against your thighs, as hard as you can, over and over and over again, and the faster your fists fly the faster your heart beats, and your blood rushes faster faster faster still and your lungs gasp sharper and tears spring from your eyes and the world is miles and miles away, but not the same way it’s always been. And just when you think you will sob from the pressure of it all the calm sets in.

  


You’re just like your mother now. And it doesn’t hurt like you thought, because it doesn’t hurt at all. You know there are endorphins running through your body but you don’t feel that either. All you feel is the comforting weight of nothing nothing nothing crushing all feeling right out of you. 

  


You feel absolutely nothing at all and you think you’d like to live there, in that never ending plane of emptiness.

  


And you remember that girl, the freshman, and how you didn’t understand what was so special about hunger, about the feeling of pain when you’re the one causing it. And you think she probably lived in the emptiness as well. And you feel like you have a friend, even though you never even met.

  


……….

  


You remember one day you opened your eyes and there was a pool of blood beneath your thighs and a box cutter in your hand and your head was buzzing too empty, and you remember that there were old scars and new scars and open red red wounds, and the thing you remember most clearly was that you didn’t remember how you got there, or ever doing this before.

  


And you remember, god, you wish you didn’t, but you remember looking up and seeing your too pale, too skinny face in the mirror, transparent blue depths underneath your eyes, red trailing from the split in your lip, and you remember seeing the reflection smile.

  


And you thought, right then, that no matter what anyone says, you’ll always be completely and utterly, devastatingly alone.

  


Just like you always knew you were.

  


There’s a certain point, you’ve calculated, at which the box sealed by the lock without a key that holds the inky black, thick and sharp and heavy secrets has to burst. The dark corner you thought you could never open breaks free, and everything you had pushed to the corner of  your mind, everything that had melded with the shadows, just becomes you. You’re a black hole of nothingness. 

  


At that point, nothing escapes, there’s nothing left you can share.

  


When you remember how you looked in the mirror, you try to remember if you could actually feel this happening. Because looking back you’re sure that’s when it did.

  


The nothing you were chasing started chasing you back, and it won.

  


All alone, forever.

  


And one day you hear someone talking about suicide, and everyone gets all quiet and fidgety and uncomfortable, and your heart does a flutter because somewhere along the way you became one of those people that nobody can talk about, the ones who would hurt themselves without flinching. 

  
  


And it makes you all fast and hot and empty inside, realizing that you are one of them. 

  


And you feel so, so small. You always feel small. 

  


You will always be what you have become, and nothing can change that now.

  


……….

You see the red red red flowing out of you and something inside you changes, just a little past too late. You see the blood pouring from your thigh and you think it’s nothing new. This pent up hurt pooling on the tile is old and stale and long past dead. You see the blood and you see your whole life, you see the trail of red behind you that you’ve been leaving for years and years and years. You remember, at that moment, something you read far too long ago; it went like this: nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

 

You’ve been churning out poetry since the day you started breathing in the smoke off of everyone else’s breath. Without you there will be no one left to write it.

 

And then you’re going, going-

 

gone.

  



End file.
